Traditional Hopi Songs - online book

Native American Songs With Sheet Music, Notation & Commentary

Argument. The semitone partition upward (in /?) of the mediant (fg) of a subminor triad (b-(g)fg-e) compresses a tetrad (in a) based on that note (c'd'-b-a-fg) and contracts the triad to a tritonus (c'd'-g, b-f), both regaining their span (d'-g, c'-f) by a semitone expansion upward.

This song makes a new and dramatic use of the serpentine lift of figure characteristic of this music, traversing the customary semitone in a more than usually complex way. The texture is woven and torn in A1, patched in A2, and displayed whole again throughout in B and C.

Downward excursions to octaves of previous notes divide A1 into three movements, (1) a, beginning with the fifth with

the fifth b-e, a tone below and hence divided into the fourth, b-fg, over the tone, fg-e, and (3)repeating the second with a coda. In all three of the movements the two fifths, upper and lower are imme­diately made sixths, the effort inexpanding the tone, e-fg, to the minor third, e-g; and causing in the descent a duplication of bound­aries (g, fg) which may be likened to a gap in the texture, as if the widening of the lower fifth had been produced by raising its upper fourth a semitone and leaving the tone below intact, as in A2 of Shiashtasha, Singer No. 2. The final note of A1 shows the influence of this lift, being the octave of the new upper boundary, c, of the lower fifth, ori­ginally b-e. The singer then traverses his course again, devoting him­self to the orderly adjustment of the original figure to the new internal boundary, g. He first reduces the span of the movement of a from the original fifth, c'd'-fg, toward the tritonus, c'd'-g, not forgetting to visit the old boundary, fg, in his closing downward excursion. There­upon he rehearsesmaking the rent in the texture more con­spicuous than before, until at the final rise just before the coda he identifies the upper limit of the original tone, fg-e, with the new lower boundary, g, of the original fourth, b-fg, thus closing the rent by mak­ing the lower fifth, b-e, also a tritonus, b-f. He then ends as before on the octave, c, of the extension of this interval, within a fourteenth one of the pitch which closed A1.

The texture at this point consists of the two original fifths (upper, c'd'-fg; lower, b-e), both shortened to tritonuses by raising the same